Dark imaginings: A new exhibition and website launched

Dark imaginings explores the emerging 18th century Gothic sensibility in literature, art and music, primarily as represented in the rare book, print and music holdings of the Baillieu Library.

This heightened creative mode abstracted nightmarish images form an earlier medieval (or ‘Gothic’) age, and fused them with a Romantic focus on imagination and emotion, to create a literary and artistic tradition of thrilling originality.

The exhibition celebrates several important 2018 anniversaries, including the publication of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the birth of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights, and references aspects of the Gothic into the 19th century and beyond.

Sitting alongside the exhibition is a new and enthralling website featuring Gothic research by scholars of the Gothic, postgraduate students and Special Collections curators. There is also an exciting opportunity for all students of the University of Melbourne to enter the micro-story competition. The exhibition and website are a timely celebration of all things wild, gloomy and fearful.